PYEONGCHANG — Jack Crawford is standing at the bottom of the downhill run at Jeongseon Alpine Centre, having just completed the first Olympic training run of his life.

A week ago, the 20-year-old from Toronto didn’t know he’d be in Korea, but he was named to the Canadian team when Erik Guay made his withdrawal because of injury official.

And now, on a cold and impossibly bright day, he is an Olympian. So, how was it?

“Pretty cool,” he says. “Definitely, um” — he searches for the right word for a beat — “hard.”

He was nervous and a little tentative, he says, glad to have that first run out of the way.

Crawford could be the future of the Canadian speed team, which on the men’s side here in Pyeongchang is neatly divided between up-and-comers and veterans. Broderick Thompson, 23, joins Crawford as Olympic rookies, although unlike Crawford he has spent the full season on the senior team and knew months ago that he had made the qualifying standard. The young skiers are mostly here to gain experience, to get some familiarity with the five-ring circus and to bank it for later.

Manuel Osborne-Paradis is clearly not. On his 34th birthday, the four-time Olympian delivered the fastest training run of the day. It will have no official bearing on Sunday’s downhill race, but it showed that Osborne-Paradis, as the saying goes, did not come to the Olympics to trade pins.

“We’re here for a medal,” he says after his run. The young guys might be here to learn the ropes, but for him and Benjamin Thomsen, the other World Cup veteran on the team, “It’s down to business,” Osborne-Paradis says. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Manuel Osborne-Paradis had the fastest time in Thursday’s training for the men’s downhill at the Jeongseon Alpine Center on Feb. 8, 2018.Dimitar Dilkoff /
AFP / Getty Images

If the Canadians weren’t considered major medal threats in the alpine events coming into Pyeongchang, have the early returns upended those expectations?

“I don’t want to answer that just yet,” he says. Osborne-Paradis starts to continue, but then glances over his shoulder at the big electronic leaderboard, where his name is sitting at the top. The little glance says a lot: What is he capable of? Have a look at the standings.

“I mean, if I have a good run, I’m capable of being up there with the best guys,” he says. “I think it really is a coin toss within the top five to 10 guys.”

And where the young guys are a little wide-eyed at it all, it doesn’t take long while speaking with Osborne-Paradis to get a sense of his comfort out there. He has been there and done that and done it again. Asked for his impressions of the Jeongseon course, the Whistler resident launches into some detailed analysis.

“The track’s great, it’s smooth, it’s so smooth,” he says. “It’s, like, buttery.” OK, detailed and laid-back analysis. “It’s aggressive snow, it’s kind of chalky, the ski really likes to dig in there, so it was kind of like, not skiing as aggressive as you want to and (instead) skiing buttery smooth.”

This is one way of saying that the downhill course is not, as these things go, terribly challenging. Not everyone is thrilled about that.

Thomsen, 30, agrees that he would like something with “a little more fear factor,” but these are the Olympics so he’ll take what he can get. These are his second Games, with the first coming at Sochi 2014.

“It’s been similar, but there’s stuff that’s completely different,” Thomsen says. “Here, there’s not a bunch of people walking around with AK-47s, the whole scene is a little more relaxed. But, it’s the pinnacle of sport. It’s inspiring and so motivating to be here.”

While the alpine events are one of the biggest spectacles at a Winter Games, they haven’t been the backbone of Canada’s strong performances at recent Olympics. Jan Hudec won a bronze medal for Canada at Sochi to break a 20-year alpine drought, but he was dropped from the Canadian team before the 2016/17 season and now skis for the Czech Republic. Guay is the country’s most accomplished alpine racer, with 25 World Cup podiums to his credit, but he came back early from a ruptured disc in his back, skipped a couple races to recover, and then decided he wasn’t healthy enough to compete in Korea. The squad will have its shots at medals, including in the new team event, but unlike so many sports here where Canada is a strong favourite, a podium finish on the big mountains would fall under the surprise category.

Not that the men who started training on Thursday morning would necessarily agree.

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